This week I installed Windows Live Writer (WLW) and set it up for posts to this blog. I was surprised how easy it was to install and create a new post. WLW can post to multiple types of blogs, all I had to do was select dasBlog and enter the admin account name and password and the wizard did the rest.

The editing environment is clean and functional and very Microsoft Word-like. WLW makes it possible to upload and position images and other rich content as though you were working on a local document. WLW lets you paste images from the clipboard into the post and does all the converting and uploading when the post is published - no more need to save screenshots to a local image file and then upload them. WLW provides a plugin model - I downloaded and installed the Precode syntax highlighter plug-in based on this post on Scott Hanselman's site.

Here's what it looks like when editing this post in WLW (the little squiggly lines are the SpellChecker, which does have an Add to Dictionary feature):